The Latest Breaking News from Lucas Auer

"Hi Liam, welcome to Formula 1. Oh, by the way, you've got a 10-place grid penalty for the sprint race due to an unscheduled engine swap."

It has taken plenty of patience and an agonising wait on the sidelines, but Liam Lawson can finally call himself a full-time Formula 1 driver.

Kelvin van der Linde claimed the DTM championship lead after dominating the opening one-hour race at the Nurburgring from pole.

Manthey EMA’s Preining fell behind both van de Linde and Feller at one stage, but quickly repassed the Abt Audi duo to claim his first win of the 2024 season and move up to second in the standings.

This year's Le Mans 24 Hours is the first for which LMGT3 cars will be eligible. Where in the previous GTE era professional drivers allied to manufacturers other than Aston Martin, Corvette, Ferrari and Porsche were frozen out, this year five new marques have been added to the aforementioned quartet,…

However, the German manufacturer has retained all three of its full pro drivers for the year, with nine-time race winner Lucas Auer, Nurburgring and Macau GT victor Maro Engel and former GT World Challenge champion Luca Stolz all staying on in the category.

Although it hasn’t signed a like-for-like replacement for its previous star Raffaele Marciello, who has switched to rival brand BMW, multiple new names will campaign the Mercedes-AMG GT3 in factory capacity across a wide variety of championships this year.

Having already won the penultimate race of the season on Saturday to stretch his advantage to 27 points, Preining wrapped up the title in qualifying on Sunday after beating his title rival Mirko Bortolotti to pole position by 0.006s.

The 911 GT3 R proved to be one of the more competitive cars at the beginning of the year, with a 1-2-3-4 result led by Christian Engelhart at Oschersleben prompting rivals to describe the DTM as a ‘Porsche Cup’ series.

Although Bortolotti held the lead from pole position at the start, he was unable to pull away from the chasing pack as he did at the Nurburgring a fortnight ago, with 20kg of success ballast on his Lamborghini keeping Feller in the hunt.

Emil Frey Ferrari driver Aitken led nearly the entire race from pole position, save for the pitstop phase, beating the SSR Performance Lamborghini of Mirko Bortolotti by 2.3s after one hour of racing at the 4.35km circuit.